Sundown Over Empty Ground

Chapter 3 The House

Harold filed the claim the following morning. I didn't tell my mother. I didn't tell anyone except Harold and the court. I spent the morning at the hotel, going over the documents again, making notes, planning. My hip was better in the mornings, and I could walk without the cane if I didn't push too hard. I was thirty-one years old, and I was preparing to sue the woman who had been my stepmother for two years and my father's wife for eight.

At noon, my phone rang. Eleanor's number.

I let it ring. I let it ring twice. Then I answered.

"Vivian." Her voice was pleasant. It was always pleasant when she was about to do something unpleasant. "I think we need to talk."

"We're talking."

"In person. There's some confusion about the trust that I'd like to clear up."

"Confusion."

"Just come to the house. We'll have lunch. We'll sort this out."

I looked at the folder on the desk. The folder that said eight hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The folder that said Eleanor had stolen my name. The folder that said she had been doing it for six years.

"I'll come to the house," I said. "But I'm not coming for lunch."

I drove out to the estate in the early afternoon. The house looked the same as it always had, the way houses look the same when they've been designed to outlast the people inside them. It was a big house, a white house, a house with columns and a circular drive and a fountain that had stopped working the year my father got sick. My mother had lived in that house for eleven years, in a small room on the second floor, with a window that looked out over the garden she had planted and never been allowed to enjoy.

Eleanor was waiting for me in the sitting room. She had set out tea. She was wearing a different silk blouse, this one pale pink, and her hair was down, the way it was when she wanted to appear maternal.

"Sit down," she said.

"No."

"Vivian, please. We're both adults."

"I'm not going to sit down in your house and drink your tea while you explain to me why you stole eight hundred thousand dollars from my father's trust."

Her face changed. It was a small change, the kind of change that only someone who had studied her would notice. The smile stayed, but the eyes got colder.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Vivian Marsh," I said. "Does that name mean anything to you."

She set down her teacup. The porcelain clicked against the saucer. "I don't know who that is."

"She was my father's cousin. She died ten years ago. Someone used her Social Security number to open an account in my name. Someone moved eight hundred and twenty thousand dollars into that account over six years. Someone who had access to the trust's internal records."

Eleanor looked at me. She looked at me for a long time. And then she smiled.

"You've been busy," she said.

"I have."

"You think you can prove any of this."

"I don't think. I know."

She reached for her tea and took a sip. She was stalling, and I knew she was stalling, and she knew I knew, and none of it mattered. I had the documents. I had Harold. I had the truth.

"Vivian," she said, "you've always been a difficult girl. Your father said that about you. Difficult. He said you were always looking for something to be angry about. He said you were just like your mother in that way." She paused. "Not a compliment."

"I'm going to file a claim on the accounts tomorrow."

"You'll lose."

"And I'm going to submit evidence of mismanagement to the court."

She set down her tea. For the first time, something flickered in her face. Not fear. Concern. The concern of a person who understood that her plans were no longer running on schedule.

"You have no proof of mismanagement."

"I have a summary from Harold Finch. I have eight hundred and twenty thousand dollars of transfers. I have a dead woman's Social Security number. I have six years of documents that you personally authorized."

Eleanor stood up. She walked to the window. The afternoon light was fading, and the garden my mother had planted was still there, bare in the winter, waiting for spring. For a moment, Eleanor looked at the garden, and I wondered if she had ever looked at it before, if she had ever thought about the woman who had planted it, if she had ever considered that the house she had spent eight years trying to own had been built by people she had spent eight years trying to forget.

"You're making a mistake," she said.

"I don't think so."

"You don't understand what's at stake."

"I understand exactly what's at stake. You're going to lose the house. You're going to lose the money. You're going to lose everything you took."

She turned around. Her face was calm again. The concern was gone. In its place was something colder, something harder, the thing underneath the silk blouses and the warm voice and the practiced smile.

"You think you're the first person who's tried to take something from me," she said.

"I don't want to take anything from you. I want what's mine."

"You don't know what's yours."

"I know what's mine. I've known since I was twelve years old, since the day my father left my mother and married you. I know what's mine. I've always known."

Eleanor smiled. It was a real smile, the first real one I had seen from her all afternoon, and it was the most unsettling thing she had ever shown me.

"Then you know," she said, "that your father gave me everything. The house. The trust. The company. Everything. He gave it to me because I was there when you weren't. Because I took care of him when he was sick. Because I was the wife he wanted, not the wife he settled for."

"My father gave you nothing. You took it. You took it from him and you took it from us."

"I didn't take anything. I was given everything. Do you understand the difference."

I understood. I understood that she believed it. I understood that she had spent so long telling herself the story that she had forgotten it was a story. I understood that Eleanor Bellamy was not a woman who thought she was stealing. She was a woman who thought she deserved to be stolen for. She thought the world owed her. She thought my father owed her. She thought I owed her. And she would never, in her entire life, understand that she was wrong.

"File your claim," she said. "File your evidence. Do what you have to do. But remember, Vivian. I've been playing this game longer than you have. And I don't lose."

I left the house without answering. I walked out to my car and drove back to the hotel and sat in the parking lot for twenty minutes before I went inside.

That night, my mother asked me where I had been.

"Out," I said.

"Vivian."

"I saw Eleanor."

My mother's face went pale. She had been sitting on the bed, reading, and now she closed the book and looked at me with the expression she had worn my entire life, the expression that said she was afraid and she didn't want me to know.

"What did she want."

"She wanted me to stop."

"Stop what."

"Stop the claim. Stop the investigation. Stop the whole thing."

My mother looked at the floor. "Maybe you should."

"Mom."

"Vivian, I've seen what she does to people. She doesn't fight fair. She fights the way she always fights. She waits and she plans and she does things you don't find out about until it's too late."

"I know how she fights. I've been watching her fight for eleven years. She's not as smart as she thinks she is."

"She's smart enough to have taken everything."

"Not everything. Not yet."

My mother looked at me with her tired eyes. She had been beautiful once, my mother. She had been young and hopeful and full of things she never got to do. And now she was fifty-six years old and living in a hotel room and her daughter was fighting a war she had never wanted to fight.

"Vivian," she said. "Please. Let it go."

I sat on the bed next to her. I took her hand. I looked at her hand, at the veins and the age spots and the wedding ring she still wore, the ring my father had given her and had never taken back, the ring she had never taken off even after he left her, even after he married Eleanor, even after he died.

"I can't let it go," I said. "I'm not doing this for me."

"Who are you doing it for."

"For you."

My mother closed her eyes. She sat there for a long time with her hand in mine. And then she said the thing she had never said before, the thing I had been waiting eleven years to hear.

"Your father," she said, "should have left me the house."

I looked at her.

"I don't want to fight," she said. "I've never wanted to fight. I've spent my whole life trying not to fight. But I want you to know. I know what he did. I know what she did. I've always known. I just didn't want to make it worse."

She opened her eyes. She looked at me. And for the first time in my life, I saw something in my mother's eyes that I had never seen before. Anger. Real anger. The kind that had been waiting, buried, for years.

"Do it," she said. "Do what you have to do."

I nodded. I didn't say anything. I didn't have to.

The next morning, I got a call from Harold. Eleanor had filed a countersuit. She was claiming that I had falsified the trust documents. She was claiming that I had been the one who had moved the money. She was claiming, in a court filing that would be public within a week, that I had been trying to steal from my father's estate since the day he died.

"Vivian," Harold said. "This is going to be ugly."

"I know," I said. "I'm ready."